Arora is an academic physician. She joined the faculty at the
University of Chicago School of Medicine in 2005. Her research considers ways to improve the education of medical students and, in turn, improve the quality of the care that physicians deliver to people in hospital. She has studied the sleep that patients get in hospital, and showed that hospitalised patients receive two hours less sleep a night than they would in the outside world. This sleep loss can increase the risk of cardiometabolic challenges, such as high blood pressure. In 2016 Arora launched the Sleep for Inpatients: Empowering Staff to Act (SIESTA)
clinical trial, which looks to support frontline staff in improving inpatient sleep. As well as studying the sleep of patients, Arora has investigated the impact of on-duty napping on the fatigue of mental health workers. As part of the study, Arora studied the patterns of first year medical residents at the
Pritzker School of Medicine. The participants wore
actiwatches, which recorded movement around hospitals, and were kept on schedules with and without scheduled naps. The medical residents who had scheduled naps reported considerably less fatigue. Alongside her research on sleep, Arora has worked on improving patient handovers; emphasising the need for effective communication, making it clear who the most ill patient is, the development of standardised strategies and improve written and verbal handoffs. In the annual meeting of the
Society of Hospital Medicine, Arora pointed out that “In business and restaurants, they have to get the order right or you won't go back... and in medicine we have a culture of errors,”. She has argued that whilst technology can be a great tool to improve a handover, over-reliance can cause significant errors. In verbal handovers, departing physicians have the opportunity to share their clinical judgements, as well as identifying their most in-need patients. In May 2020 it emerged that
Vitamin D can reduce complications amongst patients with
coronavirus disease. She investigated the impact of Vitamin D treatment and testing positive for
SARS-CoV-2.
Academic service Arora serves as Dean and Associate Chief Medical Officer at the University of Chicago. An advocate for equity in healthcare, Arora joined the
Time's Up healthcare movement in 2019. She has campaigned for an end to the
gender pay gap; where men receive considerably more than women for equal work. In an analysis of 10,000 physician faculty members at twenty four medical schools in the United States, researchers identified that women surgeons earn $44,000 less than their male counterparts. In 2020 she was made the Herb T. Abelson Professor of Medicine. == Awards and honours ==